Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Radu Jude’s film about a young rebel in Romania’s gig economy is a provocative satire on the degraded state of modern society.

For the last two decades, whenever we needed films confronting the urgent predicaments of our century—abrasive, fearless, uncompromising films—Romanian cinema has delivered them. It seems perhaps that the chaotic social landscape emerging after the overthrow of a dictator was an artistic breeding ground for fierce honesty and satire. The most recent Romanian director to emerge to some fame is Radu Jude, whose latest film is dark and defiant on a level rarely seen nowadays. It’s entitled Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

In the main part of the story, we’re in black & white, following Angela, played by Ilinca Manolache, a woman driving feverishly through Bucharest, chewing bubble gum. Pretty soon we see that she’s some kind of production assistant on a work safety film, assigned to video a series of possible candidates to tell stories of getting injured on the job. In every case, the victim’s workplace was unsafe because of neglect by the boss, but the Austrian company making the film just wants them to tell people to wear helmets and obey safety precautions.

There’s a deadline for meeting the Austrian CEO next day, so Angela is told she can’t stop working even though she hasn’t slept in ages. So she keeps going, and for much of the film Jude shows her from the passenger side view, driving on and on, until the exhaustion and noise of the city she’s passing by become overwhelming. She’s tough and cynical, and she has a side hustle, using a facial distortion app to play a bald, foul-mouthed misogynist troll in TikTok videos. It’s hard not to laugh at these profane videos, which are actually in-your-face parodies of contemporary male culture.

Then, strangely, another movie starts, which even includes opening credits, and this one’s in color. It concerns a taxi driver, also named Angela, and it looks exactly like it was filmed some time in the 1970s. The story in this color film is set during the Ceaușescu dictatorship, the repression and emotional frigidity of the movie and its performances are a stark contrast to the all-too expressive current story that we’ve been following. But there’s a hint of something more subversive in its dry humor.

These two stories keep going back and forth until eventually, when we’re back in the black & white film, Angela the young assistant runs into the taxi driver Angela, who looks like the same actress forty years later. And that’s when it occurred to me that Jude must have gotten permission to use clips from an older film—and indeed, as I discovered, it’s from Angela Moves On, directed by Lucian Bratu in 1981. Jude puts them in this movie, along with the same actress, Dorina Lazar, playing the character years later.

As we follow young Angela driving relentlessly on her way, we get the almost visceral experience of the absurd vulgarities of modern life with its social media quick fixes and overhyped interactions. This is fearless, outrageous, and funny filmmaking. But wait, there’s a Part 2. We see the real time depiction of what all this hustle ends up creating. A family is being coached to say the right thing for the work safety video, but not anything that would embarrass the company. This part isn’t meant to be fun. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World gives the middle finger to big corporate culture, and right now, we need that.